10 Charts That Explain How Schools Have Grown Less Violent Since COVID

At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement — after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 prompted nationwide outrage over police brutality — education leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland, removed campus cops from schools. 

Similar actions swept the country: Dozens of districts cut ties with the police, satisfying advocates who argued the officers did more harm than good. But the decision in this suburban Washington, D.C., school system was short lived. A year later, in April 2022, the district and the police department quietly signed an agreement to bring back the officers.

The reversal, which followed multiple campus safety incidents including a shooting inside a high school, came amid a national shift in the sentiment around school safety. As students returned to classrooms following pandemic-induced campus closures, educators reported that children brought with them newfound behavioral and mental health challenges that put teachers and other youth at risk.  

New federal data, however, complicate that narrative: In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, the latest figures from 2022 show, campus violence continued a decades-long plunge. 

In a national survey of youth ages 12 to 18, students reported that they were the victims of campus violence — including rape, robbery and assault — at a rate of 15.6 incidents per 1,000 students in 2022, the first year that students nationwide returned to in-person learning. That’s a decline from pre-pandemic levels: In 2018, for example, students reported a campus violence victimization rate of 24 incidents per 1,000. A decade ago, the rate was nearly double that.

The data, which reflect an ongoing national drop in violent crime as well, were detailed in a new report by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, which includes information on a host of indicators related to campus safety and security. In total, the figures suggest that campus violence has decreased since the pandemic with one notable exception. School shootings, while statistically rare compared to other forms of campus disorder, were once again at an all-time high.

School safety expert Deborah Temkin Cahill, the chief research officer at the nonprofit Child Trends, said the data are part of a larger, promising trajectory. In the last decade, school violence has declined precipitously, she said, as schools “double down on their efforts to improve school climate and to implement social-emotional learning.” During the pandemic, student well-being became a key focus for educators nationally. 

“That emphasis was not necessarily a priority for schools in the previous days when much of the focus was on improving reading and math scores,” she said while adding that the latest figures should be interpreted with caution. With just one year of data from when students were back in classrooms full scale, she said it’s too early to reach definitive conclusions about the pandemic’s effects. 

“We don’t know if those trends are an anomaly or if they are going to continue over time,” she told The 74. “So we are really going to want to keep track of what those look like in future data collections.”

These 10 charts show how violence in schools — with a few important caveats — has continued a decade-long decline, one that counters widely held perceptions about a post-COVID bump in campus disorder. 

Violence against students has plummeted 

In the last decade, schools nationally have seen marked declines in campus violence — according to students themselves. In 2022, students ages 12 to 18 reported that they were the victims of violence at school at a rate of 15.6 incidents per 1,000 students.

In fact, the federal data suggest that 2022 was the safest year for students in the last decade. Leading up to the pandemic, in 2018, the nation’s students were the victims of violence at school at a rate of 24 per 1,000 students.

The data suggest that the decline in school violence can be attributed in large part to a drop in simple assaults, which include campus fights and account for the majority of student victimizations. Excluding simple assault, students were the victims of violent incidents at a rate of 3.3 per 1,000 in 2022, relatively unchanged from a decade ago and a slight drop from pre-pandemic levels.

Data from 2016 were excluded from the charts above because the methodology used that year wasn’t directly comparable to that used in other studies. 

Temkin Cahill noted a new youth survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that students’ mental health challenges that surged since the pandemic have begun to wane but remain elevated from pre-pandemic levels. 

She said there’s an important distinction between “behaviors that may be the result of heightened emotional needs and ones that are truly violent or school safety related.” 

“A kid acting out in school may not rise to the level that one would perceive as violence but it may still be causing a disruption in school,” she said. “I think that’s where we’re getting these anecdotal narratives of kids being much more on edge, in part because they have heightened emotional needs.” 

Student bullying has grown less frequent — with a caveat 

In the years leading up to the pandemic, and immediately after school closures ended, reported rates of school bullying have remained relatively consistent. In 2018-19, 20% of students ages 12 to 18 reported being bullied at school, similar to the 19.2% of young people who reported the abuse in the 2021-22 academic year.

Compared to a decade ago, bullying is down significantly: 27.8% of students said they were victims in 2010-11. 

Computers have taken on a bigger role in the way students learn — and how they harass their peers. While bullying has declined overall, the prevalence of cyberbullying has grown, the data show. 

Among the students who reported experiencing bullying in 2021-22, three-quarters of those incidents took place inside classrooms or in school hallways while about a fifth occurred online or via text messaging. That’s nearly double the 11.5% of cyberbullying incidents reported in 2014-15. 

Temkin Cahill said the shift highlights how the pandemic, which forced students to spend more time online than ever before, “has fundamentally changed the ways that our youth are interacting with one another.”

School-based thefts are down

Thefts reported in schools have also been on the decline over the last decade. Such incidents were — perhaps predictably — at a low point during COVID-era school closures. Still, in 2024 after students returned in person, student thefts were below those in the years leading up to the pandemic. 

In 2022, students reported thefts at school at a rate of 6.1 incidents per 1,000 students — a slight decline from 9.4 in 2019 and 8.9 in 2018. 

The data show a marked shift from a decade ago, when 23.6 students per 1,000 reported that they had been the victims of theft on campus in 2012. 

The reduction in reported student criminality, Temkin Cahill theorized, could be influenced at least in part by another lingering pandemic byproduct: The heightened number of parents who work from home. 

“There is a link between delinquency and youth engaging in violent behavior and the presence of an adult at home when they return home from school,” she told The 74. “That has been a significant preventative factor for engaging in gang behaviors, etc.”

Indeed, gangs have lost steam

The federal data suggest an ongoing decline in student-reported gang activity inside schools over the last decade, a trend that has continued since the pandemic. 

During the 2021-22 school year, 5.5% of students said they observed the presence of gangs in their schools, a slight drop from 2018-19 when 9% of students observed gang activity at school. Since 2000, student gang reports peaked in 2004-05, when nearly a quarter of young people said the crews had a presence in their schools. 

Violent teacher injuries were way down last year

In the pandemic’s wake, teachers reported heightened fears for their physical safety. Although the latest federal data don’t offer new data on the number of teachers who were injured on the job, privately collected data on educator insurance claims offer new insight.

During the 2023-24 school year, the number of educators who filed health insurance claims after getting injured by a student behaving violently fell significantly. 

That year, the company Gallagher Bassett identified 868 insurance claims from educators who reported injuries on the job after getting assaulted by one of their students. The data were collected from about 2,000 schools nationally that serve some 1.25 million students, according to the company. Compared to a year earlier, such insurance claims were down 39%. 

In the two years immediately after the pandemic, the number of insurance claims was relatively consistent with those prior to the public health emergency, according to the data, which Gallagher Bassett provided to The 74. 

In the two years preceding the pandemic, however, the incurred costs of student-on-teacher injuries surged, from about $6 million during the 2018-19 academic year to $9.7 million in 2022-23. 

Greg McKenna, the national practice leader focused on the public sector for Gallagher Bassett, told The 74 the data suggest that violent incidents were more severe immediately after the pandemic than those in previous years. During the 2023-24 school year, the incurred costs tanked, dropping below pre-pandemic levels to about $4.9 million.

“We’re happy to report that we’re seeing a downturn,” McKenna said about the most recent decline. “Perhaps we did reach a bit of a high water mark in ’22-23 and we’re hoping that this is a continued downward trend as we go in through ’24 and beyond.” 

Campus weapons possession is down

The latest federal data suggest that fewer kids are bringing guns, knives and other weapons to class. In a 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey, 3.1% of students reported bringing a weapon to school at least once in the previous 30 days, a slight decline from a decade earlier: In 2011, 5.4% of students said they came to school with a weapon. The latest figures represent a slight increase from 2019, when 2.8% reported bringing a weapon to school. 

Students’ access to a loaded gun without adult permission has similarly waned — dropping from 6.7% in 2007 to 2.7% in 2021. 

David Riedman, the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, said the latest figures should be taken with a degree of caution. For starters, the survey was released in 2021 when some campuses remained closed from the pandemic. He also questioned the accuracy and methodology of the survey. 

Still, even if just a small percentage of high schoolers report bringing guns to school, the tally suggests that hundreds of thousands of kids nationally who are regularly coming to school armed. 

“It’s not nothing,” he told The 74, adding that his own analysis of available datasets on campus weapons possessions — including news reports — suggest the number has shot up in recent years. 

“I think that kids are carrying guns in school more frequently than they have at any other time in recent history” under a fear that they could become victims of violence at school, he said. During the pandemic, the country saw record gun sales and firearm thefts. “It’s a way to feel that they can protect themselves which, interestingly, is the same way that guns are marketed to adults.” 

Despite all the progress, student gun deaths and injuries at school remain at record highs.

In recent years, the number of students who have been killed or wounded by school shootings has surged, reaching all-time highs that persisted once COVID-era campus closures came to an end. In 2022, 23 students were wounded and 29 were killed in active shootings, where gunmen fire indiscriminately at people on a large scale. 

Active shooting injuries and deaths in 2022 were the second highest on record, trailing only 2018, the year of high-profile school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas. That year, 52 students and adults were injured and 29 were killed. 

Research published last week by the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety show that reported campus gunfire incidents — a far broader range than the active shootings tracked in the federal data — peaked in the immediate aftermath of COVID, reaching a record high of 192 incident since the group began to track them in 2013. Though the numbers have come down since then, 2023-24 had the second-highest number of reported K-12 gunfire incidents on record at 144. 

Reidman, who was one of the authors of the Everytown report, said the spike in gunfire incidents is being driven primarily by “fights that are escalating into shootings.” 

“For somebody to fire shots during a fight, it means that they need to be carrying a gun with them all day,” he said. “The chances that the kid is carrying a gun for the first time on the day that a fight happens seems pretty low to me, which must mean that there are a lot of kids who are habitually carrying guns in schools every day.” 

Students’ perception of safety has remained consistent. 

Despite the progress in recent years — including the decline in student victimization rates, reports of campus gang activity and bullying — students’ perception of safety has hardly budged over the last decade. The number of students who said they skipped school due to fears of violence has also held relatively consistent. 

During the 2021-22 school year, fewer than 5% of students said they were afraid of being attacked at school or avoided educational activities outright due to fears that someone might harm them. That rate is similar to the number from a decade ago, and a slight decline from academic years leading up to – and during — COVID. 

“The COVID years really were an anomaly and understanding the trends over that full course of time is really important,” Temkin Cahill said of the latest school safety data. “We see that the 2022 data really are a continuation of the trend we saw in prior years. We will really only understand the effects of the pandemic once we collect a couple more years of data.” 

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